Dr. Mike Brown is a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. He's best known as the man who killed Pluto, thanks to his team's discovery of Eris and other Kuiper Belt Objects. We asked him to help us explain this unusual ...
Space Exploration
Jun 17, 2015
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(Phys.org) —Astronomers are announcing today the discovery of two unusual objects in comet-like orbits that originate in the Oort cloud but with almost no activity, giving scientists a first look at their surfaces. These ...
Space Exploration
Nov 11, 2014
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(Phys.org) —NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been given the go-ahead to conduct an intensive search for a suitable outer solar system object that the New Horizons (NH) spacecraft could visit after the probe streaks though ...
Astronomy
Jul 2, 2014
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Are you ready for the summer of 2015? A showdown of epic proportions is in the making, as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to pass within 12,500 kilometres of Pluto—roughly a third of the distance of the ring of ...
Space Exploration
May 8, 2014
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The Kuiper belt—the region beyond the orbit of Neptune inhabited by a number of small bodies of rock and ice—hides many clues about the early days of the Solar System. According to the standard picture of Solar System ...
Astronomy
Jan 17, 2014
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During an intensive commissioning run, Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), mounted at prime focus on the Subaru Telescope, has successfully imaged the Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) as it journeys toward the Sun. Especially striking in the ...
Space Exploration
Nov 27, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, have uncovered new clues in the ongoing mystery of the Jovian Trojans—asteroids that orbit the sun on the same path as Jupiter. ...
Space Exploration
Oct 15, 2012
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It started with an offhand remark, an unusual characterization for astronomers talking about stars: "They're going off like popcorn."
Astronomy
Sep 11, 2012
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Neptune's largest moon Triton is most likely a captured Kuiper Belt Object. The capture of icy Triton and the subsequent taming of its orbit likely led to the formation of a subsurface ocean through tidal heating. New research ...
Space Exploration
Sep 6, 2012
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(Phys.org) -- Stars form when gravitational forces coalesce the gas and dust in interstellar clouds until the material forms clumps dense enough to become stars. Precisely how this happens, however, is still very uncertain. ...
Astronomy
Aug 6, 2012
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